“A quarter?” He swats this away. “Pfft.Make it a hundo.”
“We might need a jar for that one too,” I say, rolling my eyes at him. “Your mom’s right about those reporters, you know.”
“Nah, she’s just worried about bad press,” he says dismissively. “Trust me. She’ll be a lot happier about all this once I get her out of here.”
My heart seizes. “You’re moving?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna buy her a place.”
“You are?” I ask, blinking at him. My first thought isThat’s more like it. And my second isPlease don’t let it be far away.
“I am,” he says proudly. “And not just any place.”
My eyes widen. “No.”
“Yes,” he says, smiling at my reaction.
“Your old apartment?”
“Even better,” he says. “The whole building.”
“Really? You can do that?”
He grins. “Thanks to you.”
I can hardly believe it. I know how much it hurt to give up their home when his dad lost everything. Even six years later, Katherine still makes excuses to drive by it whenever she can: the old brick building just a few miles up the road where they once lived in a spacious two-bedroom apartment as a family of three.
“It’s for sale?”
“Not technically. I’ll have to buy up all the individual apartments. But I’m planning to make them offers they can’t refuse.”
I laugh, delighted by this. Teddy could buy practically anything he wants right now. He could get something a thousand times nicer, a hundred times bigger. But this building means something to them, and my heart swells because this is the Teddy I know.
This is the Teddy I love.
“I want to wait and surprise my mom once everything’s settled,” he says, “but I already have a bunch of ideas for how to fix it up. Want to see?”
I follow him back to his room, where his new computer is lying open on his bed. He flops down beside it, leaving room for me, but for a second all I can do is stand there, thinking about the last time I was here, that single charged moment between us.
Teddy’s face is serious as he begins to type, his eyes reflecting the light from the screen and his hair still slightly askew. Watching him, I want nothing more than to rewind the past six weeks, to bottle the way he looked at me that night, to capture the lightness I felt the next morning when he spun me around, to memorize the taste of his lips when we kissed. I want to do it all over again, even if the outcome would be the same; even if there’s no chance of a future, I still want this little piece of the past.
Though the truth, of course, is that I want more than that too.
Together we sit on his bed—Teddy sprawled out and me perched on the very edge—as he shows me a series of floor plans and layouts. “This one used to be ours, remember? There are eight units total, and my plan is to knock down the walls between them and turn the whole building into two giant apartments. One for me, and one for my mom. I’ll take the lower half, since I want to make the basement into a game room—”
“Naturally,” I say with a grin.
“Then I’m gonna build my mom her dream apartment upstairs.” He looks up at me, beaming. “All these years without her own room, and now she’s gonna have two whole floors to herself. Can you believe it?”
He looks so proud right now that my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears. “You’re going to make her so, so happy.”
“I hope so,” he says. “She deserves it.”
“So do you,” I tell him. “You manage to hide it pretty well sometimes, but you’re a really good guy at heart, Teddy McAvoy.”
He gives me a crooked smile. “Well, I do have my moments.”
When it’s time to start working on the project, we move to the floor. His room has started to look like one of those stores that sells gadgets and electronics, the kind with massage chairs and fish tanks and noise machines. There are toys and boxes everywhere: game consoles and tablets, a remote-controlled car that looks a lot like the life-sized one parked on the street below, something with wings that seems suspiciously dronelike, and even a robot, which is standing stiffly beside its box, watching me with a blank stare.
